I'm keen, really want to run Plex in the loungeroom without the PS3 so I can play The Last Of Us in the office!
How is it?
Ordered a Roku type thing off eBay for $40ish but the dealer ran off and got banned. Got the money back through Paypal but annoying I didn't get the media box I wanted
Chromecast looks to be hard to get. Aside from Fishpond there are a few on eBay but with a pricey markup sadly.
I find it pretty good.
My biggest beef is with the whole issue of the ChromeCast having hardwired DNS settings, which makes using netflix from Australia over it more troublesome.
Another is that with Plex streaming to a ChromeCast it currently does not handle soft subs well. They are all giant sized. Though it is essentially still in beta so I'm willing to cut them some slack there.
Its not as good as a PC running XBMC hooked up to a TV though in terms stream quality.
Plex are limiting streams to 12 mbps for instance - dunno if thats due to what the device can handle or to try and make sure video is stable over wifi. And the device does not natively handle surround audio formats from what I can tell. I expect everything gets converted to 6 channel aac.
Another issue is with it not for sale in Australia we'll never see it supported by the likes of iView.
But the simplicity and low cost I really like. It does make me wish for a AppleTV like box that did the same thing. had a bit more grunt to handle more media formats natively and ethernet so there'd be no need to worry about flakey wifi.
With Google trying to sell the whole GoogleCast platform that its all built on I had hoped we'd have seen OEMs showing such boxes at CES. Sadly there was none of that.
In any case I found a second on Ebay that wasn't TOO horrendous. 50$ new inc shipping.